Are YU Students “Postliterate”-Proof?
Hand a YU student an unfamiliar pasuk from Tanach or line of Gemara and they’ll work through it word by word, reading commentaries to understand every nuance. Hand that same student a paragraph of a novel, and the question is whether that same rigorous reading method is applied.
That question sits inside a larger one playing out well beyond YU. Reading is in national decline. Fewer than half of American adults read a book of any kind in 2022, according to the National Endowment for the Arts, and a separate long-running survey found the share of Americans reading for pleasure on a given day fell from 28 percent two decades ago to just 16 percent today. In an August cover story for The Atlantic, “The End of Reading Is Here,” staff writer Rose Horowitch uses these numbers together to argue America has become “postliterate”: not illiterate, but no longer willing to do the slow work reading demands. One historian tells Horowitch that reading is headed toward becoming a niche hobby, a modern day stamp collecting.
So the question for a place like YU is: if the rest of the country is forgetting how to read closely, does a curriculum built on close-reading Tanach and Gemara make its students the exception?
“Stern students never need much selling on the concept of close reading,” said Professor Seamus O’Malley, currently the Associate Chair of the Stern College English department. In classes on Biblical interpretation, he said, students learn early to spot the dangers of both over- and under-reading a text, a habit that carries over, with some adjustment, to a short story or a poem. “Our students have no barriers to the concept of close reading,” he said, “and many require little guidance beyond the technical terminology of literary criticism.”
O’Malley isn’t worried that a hyper-focus on close reading comes at the expense of developing the tool of skimming, a skill that might be crucial in an era that seems to reward fast, shallow reading. If anything, he thinks close reading is getting more valuable precisely because so few people still do it, especially with AI, which he waved off as “only good at skimming.” But O’Malley was quick to complicate his own point. Close reading, he said, isn’t really the skill disappearing. Plenty of people can still slow down for a short poem or a two-minute post. What’s actually vanishing, in his experience, is stamina: the ability to sit with a long, difficult book for hours at a stretch, day after day. “Sophisticated fiction can’t be skimmed,” he said, “but the skill of close reading isn’t one that you can sustain for the whole of Jane Eyre.”
“Reading stamina, more than close reading, is the real lost quality in today’s attention economy,” O’Malley said. His concern is not for the deterioration of close reading, but rather the stamina to conduct any level of reading (whether it’s skimming or close reading) for an extended amount of time.
The distinction between close analysis and grasp of overall material tracks a much older one inside the beit midrash itself: the tension between iyun, slow analytical study of a small unit of text, and bekiut, rapid coverage of large amounts of material to build range and familiarity. Sharon Freundel, a veteran Jewish day school teacher, makes the same distinction in a Prizmah piece on Tanakh pedagogy, noting that Prizmah’s prescribed approach to close textual study “lends itself to iyyun… rather than beki’ut.” This tradeoff, which often prioritizes iyun at bekiut’s expense, may explain the divide in O’Malley’s classroom: a curriculum that trains students in iyun-style precision doesn’t automatically train them in stamina. A student may need both close reading and skimming to get through a 400-page novel, but without the ability to maintain concentration for a long period of time, neither skill is achievable.
Matt Miller, currently on research leave from his role as Chair of the English Department, complicates that consensus. For him, the more important variable isn’t textual background at all, but motivation. “A student passionate about her focus can surpass a student with better technical skills,” he said, “because for the student who is genuinely interested, the focus and learning come so much easier.” The students who get the most out of their Judaic background, in his experience, are the ones already inclined to read widely on their own, bringing both a toolkit and a personal drive to use it. He implies that there are transferable skills to be gained from Judaic education which are “certainly an asset,” but this must come along with the requisite motivation “to study great works of secular literature.” Miller thinks the payoff extends past college too, that a Torah background helps prepare students for careers demanding the same sustained focus a serious book requires.
That there is an overlap between these two fields is not just professors’ hunches. Stern’s Jewish Studies department lists as a formal goal that students build “the linguistic and interpretive skills cultivated through hakhanah, chavruta and shiur-based learning.” The Stern English department states something strikingly similar in their learning goals: “Students will be able to analyze a variety of texts and genres. Students will be able to critically evaluate competing critical/theoretical arguments pertaining to given work(s).”
One Stern student who doesn’t come from a strong Judaic-studies background sees the exchange between these two disciplines in her peers on the daily. She told The Commentator that she feels the gap between her and her peers from day schools less in any one concept than in the broader analytical instincts (the reflex to draw connections, cite precedent and argue from a text) that her classmates picked up through years of Torah study. Those instincts surface constantly in secular classrooms, she said, not because students are showing off, but because bringing in a Torah framework is often how they make new material click for themselves. Keeping pace without that toolkit takes real, deliberate work. “I just have to put in extra effort,” she said.
She’s careful, though, not to overstate the gap. “I think having the background knowledge and experience helps so much, since people grow up learning what techniques to use and how exactly to read or interpret certain texts,” she said. “It definitely does translate, but I also think you can still get good grades and excel in classes without it, from experience.”
This isn’t incidental: it’s written into what Jewish day schools are explicitly trying to build. The same Prizmah piece states that graduates of a rigorous Tanakh program should be able to do “independent leyning or translating, explaining and analyzing a previously unseen text” — a benchmark aimed squarely at unseen-text analysis, the same skill a college literature class spends a semester teaching from zero.
It’s also the same skill Horowitch says the country is losing. “Postliterate” doesn’t mean illiterate: it means unwilling to sit with a text long enough to do that kind of work. Trained in that discipline since childhood, many YU students may be less at risk of that particular decline than their peers elsewhere. But the discipline that protects them is iyun, not bekiut, and on stamina, on the sheer ability to stay with a difficult text for hours rather than minutes, YU students may be in just as much trouble as the rest of the country.
Photo Caption: YU Beit Midrash
Photo Credit: YU Website
